Hell yeah I did.
As of three weeks ago, MFA Thesis Novel, my satire about a grad school writing program, is officially signed and scheduled for publication with Vine Leaves Press in April 2022. That means that my goal of publishing an actual novel is finally going to become a reality.
MFA Thesis Novel is about a twentysomething writer named Flip Montcalm (who’s definitely not based on me) who enters a grad school writing program (that definitely isn’t based on the one I went to at the University of Nebraska) in the barrens of the Midwest. However, no one around him seems to like his novel, and in an world of fierce competition, Flip has to figure out how to write something that’s both meaningful and that people will actually like. It’s a novel about fitting in, starting out as a writer, and the desolate working conditions that thousands of underpaid grad students face every year, along with what it’s like to be a lonely young artist in a strange place.
Plus there’s jokes. And cursing (fuck yeah!). And lots of pop culture references. Plus parodies of other writers, and a lot of novels-within-the-novel that were really fun to write.
I’ll be posting more about the novel in the upcoming months (April 2022 seems both really far and really close!), but for now, here’s a rundown of how I found Vine Leaves Press and signed the contract…
I’ve Been Querying MFA Thesis Novel for a LONG Time
Waaaaaaaaaaay back in January 2019 I finally finished a draft of MFA Thesis Novel that I felt comfortable sending out—for those of you keeping count, this was somewhere around draft six. In hope of landing a publishing deal with a major press that could get my novel into bookstores and the like, I started by querying literary agents, using free sites like Querytracker and Agentquery to search for agents who might be interested in a book like mine.
Querying agents is REALLY hard because a lot of agent websites kind of say the same thing—they want writing that’ll knock their socks off, writing that stirs them, writing that’ll make them excited, etc. On a more specific level they usually ask for genres like Nonfiction, Fantasy, Mystery, and so on, which are more helpful…except that MFA Thesis Novel is difficult to fit into one of these boxes. It definitely falls under the umbrella of Literary Fiction, but that’s an big umbrella that a LOT of books fall under, most of which are way more serious than MFA Thesis Novel and don’t have oral sex jokes in them.
So I tried to research each agent by looking into what kinds of books they’d represented, which took a LONG time and usually left me with only a vague grasp of whether the agent was a good fit. Then when I started sending query letters out, it sometimes took a LONG time to hear back, which turned the whole process into a giant game of researching and waiting.
In the end, I queried 72 agents and got exactly zero requests to see the full manuscript. One agent who wrote me a personalized rejection told me that a novel making fun of grad school writing programs didn’t seem like it would have a big enough audience, and I thought about that comment for a long time.
Next I Tried Small Presses!
As I talked about in my querying update last fall, I next looked into independent small presses, many of which consider manuscripts from individual writers rather than going through literary agents. Independent presses run the gamut of being huge and well-known (like New Directions) to super-indie ones that publish handmade zines and chapbooks. I was looking for something in-between—a press that published novels, but that was open to an unconventional project like mine that’s not going to sell 10,000 copies and make the New York Times Bestseller list.
So with renewed vigor I revised my query letter and started researching, mostly using the (also free) small press listings on NewPages as a guide. I went through literally every press on the list that published fiction and considered whether they’d be a good fit for MFA Thesis Novel—I was able to eliminate 50% of them within thirty seconds based on their websites alone, another 25% based on what they’d actually published, and another 23% when I realized that they weren’t accepting unsolicited submissions. That left a pretty small number of places that were actually worth applying to.
After applying to only eight different presses, in February I got a positive reply back—one of them wanted to publish my book!!!! I was beyond ecstatic when I got their offer, and went through the process of reading through the contract and talking to the editor on the phone. When everything checked out, I signed and sent the contract back…
…only to have the press cancel it two weeks later because of COVID-19-related economic worries. I talked about this in my earlier post about the cancelled contract, but the news made me pretty. fucking. miserable.
After a few days of stewing in my own juices, though, I got back on the querying horse—if the novel was good enough for one small press, it must be good enough for others too, COVID or no COVID. I started by emailing the other presses whose submissions I’d withdrawn on Submittable explaining about the cancelled contract and asking them super-nicely to reconsider me. I got in touch with about half of them, which was good enough for me.
Then I started querying anew, which involved more research, tweaking my query letter to explain about the cancelled contract, and trying not to let COVID-19 worries get me down. Most days I felt good and kept my spirits up…but some days I still felt pretty down about my prospects.
I should also mention that about half of the small presses I applied to required some sort of submission fee—ranging from a few bucks to cover Submittable’s fee-based submission system to $20-30 to cover a contest entry, for which the winner receives publication and a prize of around $1,000. I did decide to pay the fees to get my work seen, and ended up spending $193 total on fees ($133 of which were for contests with cash payouts), plus ¥1,300 (about $13) on mailing physical manuscript excerpts back to the States.
While I won’t dwell much on the ethics of charging writers to submit their work and how this favors those who have financial resources over those who don’t, I was happy to be at a point in my life where I can afford to invest $193 toward my future as a published writer, thanks in no small part to my job and cheap living situation in Japan. That 200 bucks also pales in comparison to the $600 in submission fees (spread across twelve schools) I paid submitting to grad school in the first place, plus the cost of taking the GRE. These systems clearly create barriers to entry that make life more difficult for younger writers or writers who are less well off while favoring writers who have lots of money, but they’re the reality of the system we live in—and one that I decided to work through in my path forward.
Finding Vine Leaves Press
I found Vine Leaves Press on the NewPages small press list, same as all the other presses—I’d actually looked through their website back in January, but got the contract offer from the first press before I could apply. They seemed open to new authors, and I liked their varied selection of titles, which included some gritty and cool stuff that MFA Thesis Novel might fit in well with. I was also impressed by the editor, Jessica Bell, who, in addition to running the press and being an author herself, is also a book cover designer, a voice actress, and a musician—she plays with the chill-wave group Keep Shelly in Athens and has an active solo career as well.
As per their website instructions, I sent Vine Leaves a query letter and the first ten pages of the novel. Since I’d already looked through the press’s website and checked out Jessica’s other work (I thought it was cool that she worked in so many different fields), it was super-easy to tailor the query letter to Vine Leaves specifically and show them why they’d be interested in an offbeat novel about the importance of creativity in a cookie-cutter world.
Then I played the waiting game…and six weeks later, I got a form-letter response asking me to send the full manuscript.
It was good news, of course, but I didn’t get too ecstatic. This was in the middle of my querying process—I was still researching other presses and sending out queries, since I didn’t want to get my hopes up too far over one manuscript request. In total, I applied to 14 more small presses spread out over three months.
Then, one morning in early July, I got an acceptance email from Jessica Bell saying they’d loved my book and wanted to publish it in April 2022—if it was still available, of course.
The Offer
I’ll be honest: I didn’t know what to think when I read that email. I’d been burned once before, and I half expected there’d been some mistake, or that I’d misread the email, or that the contract would be something I wouldn’t feel comfortable signing. Besides, I was on my way to work and had other stuff to do—it was hard to process all at once.
I emailed Jessica back, along with Amie McCracken, the publishing director at Vine Leaves, saying that the novel was indeed still available and that I was interested in the next steps. Said next steps turned out to be looking over the contract, which Amie then sent me.
I put off looking over the actual contract for a few days, mostly because I was really busy, but partly because I felt intimidated—what if the contract turned out to be bad, or what if the deal fell through like it did with the first press? I felt intimidated, and it was a lot to think about all at once. I told a few close friends about the offer, but mostly kept it a secret.
Once I finally opened the contract I found it surprisingly straightforward—the contract was the same as the sample one on the Vine Leaves website, so you can actually read the same contract I signed online (author royalty amounts included!). It was shorter and simpler than the contract I’d signed with the first press—and more importantly, there weren’t any provisions saying that the press could cancel it without notice and leave me in the dust.
Another HUGE confidence boost I got from the offer was that Jessica’s initial email included a two-page (single-spaced!) Word doc with notes from Melanie Faith, the developmental editor I’d be working with in finalizing the manuscript. I read over her notes and immediately saw that she was on the same page as me—she liked the protagonist’s loneliness, the novel’s conflict between finding success and selling out, and my plethora of literary and movie references. She also pointed out a few rough spots but was optimistic about our ability to fix them—these were sections that I’d felt unsure about too but wasn’t yet sure what to do with, and once again it felt good knowing that we were on the same page.
Overall, after reading Melanie’s thorough comments, one thing was clear: I wanted to work with her on this novel because she felt the same way about it that I did.
The Phone Call
I still wanted a bit more info moving forward, especially about the press and how they operated. Vine Leaves actually has a pretty thorough FAQ page on their website, but I wanted to dive a little deeper and talk to an actual person. I emailed Amie (the publishing director), who put me back in touch with Jessica (the publisher) about doing a call. I’m in Japan and she’s in Greece, so the time difference worked out well for us doing a Facebook call after I got off work.
Jessica was really interesting to talk to on the phone, and she was open and candid about the press, their books, and their goals. She told me that Vine Leaves Press’s mission was to publish innovative books that lay outside the mainstream and had been overlooked by other presses—a description that fit MFA Thesis Novel perfectly.
We also talked a lot about marketing—what resources the press had available, how they could help, and how much authors typically did themselves. This gave me a better idea of what it’d be like to actually try to sell the book when the time came.
Jessica also said that she designs the book covers herself, which I thought was super-cool because all of the press’s covers look really, really good—another reason I’d wanted to send them my book in the first place. (You can check out their awesome selection of covers here.)
I also wanted to give Jessica an idea of what it’d be like to work with me—what I was looking for in a press, how I could promote the book, and what resources I could bring to the table. To be honest, though, this was the aspect of the call I kind of botched—a few times I felt like I came across as arrogant, or like I’d gotten in over my head and was trying to act more professional or established than I was. This felt false and awkward to me, and luckily I realized it in the moment—which I why I’m pretty sure I’m not going to make those same mistakes again.
Overall, though, the call went very well—it lasted just under an hour, and we talked about a lot. I ended by thanking her for all the information and saying that I was feeling positively about the experience, implying (without actually saying so) that I’d send the contract back in a few days.
Signing and Moving Forward
Afterward I took some time to relax and chill on my bed—the call had been a lot to take in all at once, and I needed to calm my racing mind. After a night’s sleep I felt better—and I knew there was zero reason why I shouldn’t sign that contract.
I sent the contract back two days later, along with thank-you emails to Jessica for the call, to Amie for her patience and information, and to Melanie for her thorough comments. Since then Melanie and I have had a small correspondence going about the editorial process and some other specifics, and she’s been nothing but kind and professional in getting me started :-)
So that’s where things stand now—I’m still in a bit of a daze and needed some time to chill and tell the news to close family and friends, but I’m at a point now where I finally feel able to share the news online. I also wanted to write this post as a way of chronicling the process, but also potentially showing other writers what signing with a small press can look like. Of course every press is different, but I hope other writers can take something useful away from this.
I’ll have a LOT more to say about MFA Thesis Novel before 2022, I’m sure, so this seems like a good time to end. I owe a lot of people a lot of thanks for your support over the years, and your encouragement does a lot to keep me moving forward :-)